Everyone can understand why young adults remain living at home: housing (either buying or renting) has become prohibitive in Portugal, just as it is almost everywhere else in the developed world.
Today, Eurostat hammers the reality a little further home by saying that young Portuguese are the 7th in the EU ranking of ‘those who leave home latest’.
The average age of 28.9 years is not surprising. In Croatia (where the minimum wage is actually a little higher than it is in Portugal), young people on average remain living at home until they are 31.3 years. Slovakia is little better: 30.9 years, followed by Greece with 30.7 years.
Italy and Spain also see their ‘younger generations’ hampered from moving forwards because of the impossibility of housing prices a little longer than they are in Portugal.
UK is pretty much on the same scale as Portugal.
Eurostat refers to the situation across the EU as being slightly ‘lower’: around the age of 26, with young people in Nordic countries (where salaries are so much higher than in southern Europe) managing to leave home and live under their own steam in their early 20s.
Regarding the proportion of available income going on securing a roof over one’s head (when you are lucky enough to be able to afford one), this too is higher for younger generations than it is for the population as a whole (9.7% of young people in the EU spending 40% of their salaries, “or more”, on accommodation, as opposed to only 8.2% of the rest of the population).
Years ago, Portugal’s then prime minister António Costa asked European Commissioner Ursula Von der Leyen for an EU response to the housing crisis. At the time, she said she didn’t think it was necessary. But time has moved on, and now Mr Costa is President of the European Council and calling for… a European policy to combat the housing crisis.
As he explained at the Porto Social Forum 2025 last week, “affordable housing has become one of the most urgent challenges in the member states and one that is essential if we are to ensure social cohesion and the sustainability of democracies in Europe.”
Nothing fuels populism more than the sense of abandonment and the lack of prospects that the new generations encounter when they look for their first home to build their lives, he warned – and nothing is rising more, across the EU, and in Portugal, than populism (just consider the meteoric rise of CHEGA in recent elections, as opposed to the plummeting of popularity of the traditional left-wing).
Housing is now a cross-cutting concern in all European societies, and there is no European government that doesn’t have housing at the forefront of its concerns, says Costa.
Thus, the next formal meeting of the European Council (next month) will be dedicated to affordable housing, and how this can be attained.
The way Mr Costa sees it: “We need European solutions to a structural problem in our democracies, which affects the life expectancy of young people by postponing dreams and projects and which affects the middle classes by destabilising their professional and family lives, damaging talent retention and further aggravating Europe’s demographic challenge.”
Last week, at the plenary session of the European Parliament in the French city of Strasbourg, Ursula Von der Leyen revealed that “later this year” the first European plan for affordable housing will be presented.
In many of the countries suffering the most (Portugal included), the situation is aggravated by “lack of availability due to tourism”. This has also led to some countries seeing movements and protests against tourism. Thus, Portugal’s next steps trying to secure homes for young people are crucial.
Yesterday in parliament, the prime minister announced “a ‘broad’ set of measures in the area of housing, including increased tax deductions for tenants and reduced rates for landlords”.
It will be imperative for Portugal’s political leaders to boost young people’s prospects, or they will find that António Costa’s warnings about populism come back to bite them.
Source material: SIC Notícias/ Lusa
